ten fishes, ten years
(number 75)
The 75th Secret Restaurant Portland, our 10th anniversary celebration, was intended to take place on March 15th, 2020. When I tell this to people, it often takes them a moment before they equate that day, that weekend, with the humankind-wide shared experience of the world as we knew it shutting down. When they get there, they go "Oh...shit," or something like that. It is the right response. We had a momentous and special dinner planned, in celebration of a decade of doing a project for nothing but the experience of it. Then, the experience of having our celebration was suddenly made irrelevant, because the world was truly changing before our eyes.
It's not like we hadn't been reading the news. I sent an email to the holders of the tickets to do a vibe check, to see how everyone felt about gathering to eat a dinner together considering such things were becoming less normal. People memorably replied with notes like "All good!" or "Can you just make sure there is some hand sanitizer available?" We didn't actually cancel until the afternoon of the day before. I had spent an eerie day at preschool, where about half the class came to school and we spent the slow day cleaning everything with our bleach-tinged cleaning solution, then said goodbye to families for what was going to be a "three week spring break.” I walked through the neighborhood to Scottie's Pizza Parlor, my favorite slice shop, for a late lunch while I waited for Lucas. I remember a guy asking the people working if things had been different for them yet, and "No way!" being the reply. Lucas picked me up and we zoomed out to the Newman's Fish Company distribution center, arriving just minutes before they close, mid-afternoon. We picked up our $400 wholesale fish order, much of which was frozen. The lady joked that if we had to cancel our dinner, at least we could just put the still frozen fish in our chest freezer. How poignant, to remember it now!
On the way out there we had discussed the options. Proceed, don't proceed, and all the nuances of why and why not. Upon leaving, I think we knew we were going to end up cancelling. This feeling of being on the precipace was so memorably and poignantly written about by Gabrielle Hamilton for the New York Times about these same days. We, of course, just do this for fun – and our livelihoods do not depend on people coming to dinner. We've been on hiatus before (during the time around when The Myrtlewood Cookbook was released) and could be again. Outside the wine shop, we got our first notification that one of the crew members wasn't feeling it. Then another. With that, we knew that no matter what, safe as it might have been for us to share dinner with a room full of people at that precise moment, the dinner would be clouded by the looming change happening outside of our little project. We picked up the cases of wine, thinking the dinner might be able to happen “in a month or so.”
I wrote an email on my phone to the guests with the news. Sofie was having oysters with her friend down the street from where we were. Now that we didn't have to immediately start cooking, we went to join them. An eerily appropriate last dining out moment – a dozen oysters each and very cold, saline white wine.
I invited Adam and Will, my good friends and kitchen crew, to come over that night anyway, for a real last supper. It would be the last time anyone else came into our house for months. I made the New England style crab bisque that was intended for the dinner. We drank an extra fancy cloudy fizzy bottle of wine. We felt a magic togetherness that we knew was temporary, fleeting, and yet by having the supper together we were cosmically sending signals that we mattered to each other and would come together again.
I have wondered for a full three years about what to do with these fine printed menus, this idea of a dinner. At first we, like many other folks cancelling events that weekend, thought "We'll do this dinner sometime in May! It'll be over, or at least less scary by then, right?"
We nearly organized a dinner, not quite the same but with the same spirit behind it, to happen in the backyard at the Whiskey Farm in the summer of 2021, but in the end the schedules of the whole crew never lined up. We even had a dinner where Will, Adam, Lucas, and I cooked together and talked about the possibilities, in that window of the summer where everyone was suddenly vaccinated and going into each other's houses.
It still hasn't happened. What I do know is that this experience has made me all the more confident about Secret Restaurant Portland being an eternal thing – a project which morphs into whatever form it needs to and happens only when the stars truly align. We of course ate all of the produce and the dry goods purchased for the dinner during the first lockdown. We made our way through the fish in the freezer over the rest of 2020. The wine still sits in its boxes, ready for whatever this first dinner may be. But we know it will not be the same as the planned one. Something about it would feel wrong. I publish this strange entry to this log on the cusp of announcing the first new dinner, on close to the 3 year anniversary of when this one should have been.
With this entry I am committing the dinner, our "Feast of 10 fishes" (a take on the Italian Christmas Eve "Feast of the seven fishes"), to fiction. It did not happen, but as an exercise, for my own entertainment as well as yours, I am going to write about it as though it did.
Milk rolls stuffed with crab salad
A take on the classic lobster roll I love so much from summer trips to Maine, this is a Japanese milk roll bun stuffed with dungeness crab, celery, scallions, parsley, and melted butter.
Seafood corndogs
A Secret Restaurant Greatest Hits deep cut. A seafood sausage made from ling cod, monkfish, and local bay shrimp, seasoned with old bay and herbs. Made spherical, breaded with cornmeal breading, and deep fried, on stout skewer. Serve with aioli.
New England style bisque
A tomato based bisque using fish stock, butter, shallots, fermented peppers, black cod, and crab.
Pickled trout and early spring greens
Delicious, fatty trout pickled with white wine vinegar, salt, and sugar. Served simply with a salad of home-garden lettuces, lemon, and green olive oil.
Oyster sauce raab
Lucas made oyster sauce. Like, the oyster sauce from the asian grocery that is thick, brown, and syrupy – but he actually started with a ton of oysters. It cooked for 3 days. An homage to a mutual favorite Chinese restaurant out on 82nd Avenue – Chinese Delicacy, which serves Chinese broccoli this way: flowering raab blanched in heavily salted water, drained and drizzled with oyster sauce.
Grilled octopus/potato salad
The Venetian octopus salad we have made twice over the years. This time grilled over very high heat and dusted with hot paprika. The potatoes given extra brininess and depth with crushed olives.
Portuguese style salt cod with salad and bread
A dish inspired by a bar snack I had at a bar called Aduela in Porto, Portugal. Salt cod soaked and simmered in good olive oil until flaky, cooled in the same olive oil, and served in a dish with it as well. A small chopped salad and piece of crusty sourdough.
Turkish stuffed mussels
Like the mussels served as a snack all over Turkey, stuffed with delicious rice which has soaked up the mussel liquor. Flecks of herbs, lots of black pepper.
Sous vide salmon, wild rice, root purée
A cheeky take on old school “Northwest” restaurant entrees, but also sort of poking fun at where we were in 2010. Raised on such entrees, rebelling against them, and yet amusingly taken with the magic of a sous vide setup and a Vitamix for serious blending. This was so be a bite also poking fun at a terrible restaurant called Superbite that once existed here – not to be mean spirited, of course (it isn't even there to be put down anymore) – but to recall the funny concept of creating "bites" that were often meant to distill the ideas of an entire entree. Here we have a little paper cone, the bottom filled with buttery parsnip puree, topped with crispy fried wild rice made into a bit of a nest, with a soft and giving piece of salmon in the center. A sprig of dill. An entire history of our region's fine dining, in one County Fair style disposable water cup.
Lemon possets, pistachio nougat, almond brittle, blood oranges
Little ramekins of lemon posset (a set pudding made with sweetened condensed milk and tons of fresh lemon juice). Each served with a piece of homemade nougat with extremely bright pistachios and a piece of homemade almond brittle resting on top. Bowls of small blood oranges set out around the space. Dark red peels scattered around the space, stained fingers, fulfilled dreams.
